The films in competition at the Marrakech International Film Festival, which completed its latest annual edition on December 12, were filled with the grim realities of our present global world. There were few comedies at the event, and even the most blatant — “Rock the Kasbah,” presented on opening night as part of a tribute to Bill Murray — was underlined by its setting in Afghanistan and a message promoting peace across borders. (The film did not work, and was only nominally funny, which might explain its terrible reception here in the United States when it was released in October.) The best films at the festival were broadly political in nature but tended to fold their ideas into narrowly focused character studies, a style that allowed for good performances but didn’t support the sense that the movie was complete.With our world in disarray, promoting harmony through film was one of the main goals of the festival, even if it wasn’t explicitly stated. It was certainly on the mind of jury president Francis Ford Coppola, who, during interviews with members of the press, talked about the future of filmmaking and what film could do to respond to a non-stop stream of tragedy. “Educate,” Coppola said, rather forcefully. But he went one step further: During the awards ceremony, he handed out jury prizes to literally all of the films screened in the main competition. The prizes, he said during his closing speech, were for “cinema itself.”The decision to award the jury prizes was confusing and understandably contested by critics, who argued that it rendered the jury meaningless. Coppola was circumventing the process, and possibly even other jury members (he mentioned in his speech that it was not a unanimous decision, but decided by majority vote — which explained the frowns of some of the jury members as the decision was announced), to make a statement.“These are times when we human beings can accomplish any goal, however difficult, by working together,” he said during his closing speech. In other words, by giving everyone a trophy, filmmaking can break away from its good/bad binary. Except, of course, that the jury prize is not the top prize at the festival. So, to look at it in a different way, all the films at the festival are great — except one, which is better.The festival’s grand prize — The Golden Star — was awarded to Lebanese director Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya’s “Very Big Shot.” The choice was not surprising. “Very Big Shot” is a visceral story of a group of criminal siblings looking to focus on legitimate work after one serves a prison sentence; but before they can start their new life, they are forced to undertake one more shipment of drugs across the border. Attempting to outmaneuver their former bosses, they can’t take their former smuggling route through Syria, so they devise a plan to hide the drugs in film canisters, which don’t have to be scanned at the airport. But the only way to do that without being interrogated by authorities is to have the proper permits of a film production. So they start making a movie.The film’s shift from intense drama to broad comedy is surprising and crowd-pleasing, but its exploration of criminal life and the relationships between Muslims and Christians (the plot of the movie they begin making) is not well developed, wrapped in tough-guy violence for the first half and goofy comedy for the second, like one hour of “Goodfellas” and another hour of “Analyze This.”I would have much rather seen Park Suk-Young’s “Steel Flower” get more recognition. The story of a young homeless woman in Busan, South Korea, the film does a lot with very little, keeping its camera close to its main character while she wanders the streets looking for food and a job, all the while dreaming of a life where she can take tap-dance classes. Suk-Young limits the amount of information the audience receives — we never know why the main character is homeless, or if she might be suffering from a mental illness. But what we do get is an affecting portrait of a life with no options, where every direction is barred and hatred is unfairly dispelled, especially because the main character is a woman. (The film also has one of the best closing shots in recent memory, and that alone makes the film worth seeing.) Zhassulan Poshanov’s “Toll Bar” also deserves mention. It’s the shortest film in the competition at just over one hour, but also one of the most startling shocks, a story of class divide in modern Kazakhstan and the clashing lives of a poor parking attendant and a rich student.Both of these films, technically, can now say they won the jury prize in Marrakech. But at the end of the day, their win does not push them forward — it simply keeps them in place.Coppola might be against the increasing competition inherent in the filmmaking industry, but part of having one’s film selected for a film festival doesn’t just provide the opportunity to be shown in front of larger and more diverse audiences. The point of a film festival prize is for the jury to elevate one film beyond the rest, increasing its chances of having a longer life.Giving the prize to all the films is a bold gesture, but it’s ultimately an empty one that restricts any of the films from breaking out from the pack.
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